Page 35 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

It was incredible just how many personal objects could wind up in an office after some ungodly number of years.

Barrows brought a large valise from home on this last day of his to gather them up, though Matty had needed to find another crate in the storage cupboard to catch what would not fit.

There were framed photographs of his family, doodles and stick-and-glue creations from his grandchildren, little tins or bits of silverware from a decade of meals taken at desks during long days, kerchiefs and sweaters and a sock, even, which neither of them could remember him taking off and leaving for dead in a box of other sundry at the bottom of the closet.

Not to mention the office supplies, the ink bottles and notebooks and more pens than seemed proper.

Paperweights and fidgety trinkets to fuss around with while thinking things through.

A little of everything, it seemed, all the proof of his life and his presence and the standard-issue humanity that would eventually lead all of them to cleaning their desks out and moving on in the end.

Matty hadn’t even noticed just how much of Barrows made up the office until it was gone. A lot of it had been, quite frankly, junk. While it was hard to recall which individual objects were missing from the shelves, the room looked empty without them.

He wondered what Detective Ashton would fill the place with when he took over that desk. Barrows’s position had not been filled when Matty proved undesirable for it. Instead, things were merely shuffled around, so it would be Matty and his dearest Scotland Yard chum in here starting tomorrow.

“Well, Matthew.”

Matty turned. Barrows was standing near the door with his hat on, the valise clutched in his hand, the crate by his feet. With his mark on the office gone and his badge already left on Superintendent Frost’s desk, he looked out of place in this room he’d been such an integral part of.

“I suppose that’s it,” Barrows went on. “I think we’ve swept out every corner.”

Fortunately, with all his training, Matty’s eyes never wept anymore without his mind’s permission. So though his belly was churning and his throat felt lumpy, he could work around all that without a single tremble in his voice. “Not quite every corner, sir.”

He dug in his clothes—his Scotland Yard clothes, not the artsy ones he’d started wearing on his own time, all plain grays or browns, not exactly a uniform in this department but nearly as unchanging as one—and took out the ring on its chain.

It was a shame it had to go this way, but at least Warren had found the ring to give back in the first place.

They’d have this bit of closure amid this lackluster and uncelebratory parting that had replaced the exciting handover of duties they’d expected.

Matty held it out by the chain, not even daring to touch this symbol of his thwarted successes.

Barrows just stared at it.

“Take it,” Matty said, when he could not stand the wait an other second. “I’m not getting the promotion. I bungled things so badly, in fact, that no one is. So take it back. Please.”

“Matthew, it was a gift, I don’t—”

“Please,” he said again, through gritted teeth this time. The intensity spurred Barrows to action. At last, he held out his palm and Matty dropped the ring in.

“It’s just that I’d have thought you’d want to keep it anyway,” Barrows said quietly, hand still open, giving Matty a chance to take it back.

“Well, I don’t.” Matty shoved his own hands in his pockets, out of reach of any attempt at return.

With a grim nod, Barrows tucked the thing away in his coat. “I’ll hang on to it for you, then. For now.”

Until when? Matty did not say, did not shout right in the old man’s face somehow.

When you invite me for tea and pastries?

Have me over to meet your grandchildren?

To have supper with your wife who always resented the time I spent in your house?

These things would not happen. If they were to, Barrows would have made some indication of it by now. He was leaving. This was final.

And Matty, for his part, couldn’t bear to extend it another second. He stooped and gathered up the crate, hefting it onto his hip so he could use the other hand to open the door.

“Let’s get you to your coach, sir,” he said as kindly as possible. “You’ve got a whole new world out there waiting for you.”

He saw Barrows off, and when he returned to the office alone, he gave his eyes permission to do as they pleased for a good long while.

* * *

It was a very good thing Warren had given Matty something to look forward to after all that.

After such a shit show of a workday, he clung to the idea that there might be somewhere else he was wanted.

If Warren could convince Mr. Forester that Matty could be trusted, he would finally spend a real evening at The Curious Fox.

He dutifully went to the pub Warren had suggested, drinking stout and practicing his shading while he waited for the summons that would let him know the conversation had gone well. He waited. And waited. And waited further, the agreed-upon midnight coming and going without a word.

Just in case, he gave it an extra half-hour before losing hope.

Eventually, though, the absence of a messenger became just as clear as the presence of one might have been.

Mr. Forester had said no. It was on to plan B, then, where Matty would meet Warren at the club come morning instead, just the two of them.

Better than nothing. Better than a lot of things. He ought to be satisfied with it.

He downed his final glass thinking back to his visit to The Curious Fox, and further back, to his months in Mr. Forester’s employment.

After a day like today, the time he’d spent pretending to be his valet, making steady progress on the case and being treated well in the meantime, suddenly seemed like it might have been the peak of his Scotland Yard career.

A downhill slide was all that awaited him now.

Focused as he was on the morning ahead, he still had to figure out what to do with himself in the meantime.

He could go back to his room for the night.

But his limbs were heavy from more disappointment than he could have ever expected from something that shouldn’t have been a surprise at all.

After having been denied the bright, debauched comradery he’d been hoping for, the last place he wanted to land was in his own bed.

He opted to take a room at the public house to save himself the trip. The stout and the supper provided were thick enough that they lulled him to sleep more thoroughly than he had expected in the circumstances.

In the morning, as he tried to get his hair to behave before a dingy little mirror, he regretted his laziness the night before.

During the haze of waiting, he’d been focused on the possible night ahead of him, imagining himself introduced to Warren’s friends until they were ready to sneak off into some secluded corner, as was apparently Warren’s habit.

He’d forgotten that what Warren wanted first and foremost was to draw him.

Properly. That might prove easier if Matty did not look precisely like he’d freshened himself up in the meager offerings of a cheap public house.

When he’d done all he could, he spent a moment with the glass.

Matty had spent a lot of time looking at himself in glasses, creating impeccable and case-appropriate visages for himself.

As he failed at his task this morning, he realized something that deepened a line that was starting to develop between his eyebrows.

He’d been wrong at the start of this doomed case, when he thought he’d never done anything creative.

That wasn’t true at all. It was simply that he himself was the creation.

Or the look of him, anyway. He’d always liked the way he looked—how could he not?

—but it never seemed to have much to do with him .

With Matty’s own person. What he created in the glass might have been a painting on the wall for all he related to it.

This morning though, frustrated though he was with the insufficiency of his canvas and tools, he found something very different in his reflection.

He could see himself, see the little circles that had appeared after a hard day and unsatisfying night.

The continued roughness of his chin; he could have requested a razor to take care of that if he’d wanted to, but he hadn’t because he was used to it now.

There was the interminable rumple of his clothes that gave away the night they’d spent tossed over a chair, parts of the linen simply rinsed in last night’s water bowl and left to dry freshened but a little crunchy.

All the flaws he was used to smoothing away bore witness to something real, some experience, some choice he’d made, some feeling he’d had.

He liked it. He liked it quite a lot.

So though it did not seem right to sit for a portrait in this state, he opted not to head back to his room to put himself together. Maybe it was foolish, and maybe he was wrong, but some little voice inside told him that Warren might just like it too.

* * *

Matty did the knock at The Curious Fox’s door.

Figured, didn’t it, that Mr. Forester was practical enough to bar Matty from the place, yet too sentimental to change his bloody secret knock after his last scrape with disaster.

The pattern had significance from his and his lover Mr. Clarke’s schoolboy days, and Mr. Forester, being a romantic, had of course found another use for it.

God, it would be bloody embarrassing to run into him after all this. He hoped he hadn’t come too early. Or too late. He was not prepared to deal with such an awkward encounter after seeing Barrows off yesterday…

Last time Matty was here, he’d been met with a ledger, a doorman, and a lot of questions about his references and identity.